Chapter Thirty One
Evaluation

Jennifer Shepherd, seated at her desk, regards the young woman standing opposite her with a critical eye. She's seen a lot of the FLETC trainee and fledgling NCIS prospective Special Agent in the past week, more than she'd normally expect and far more than she'd hoped for.

It's nearly eleven and she hadn't wanted to have this encounter so soon today, but William Wetzel's wake begins this afternoon. She wants the young woman to have closure here so she can devote her attention to saying goodbye to her father and dealing with her vastly changed and still rapidly changing family.

The twenty year old had come into this case as a grieving dependent and had wormed her way into the Investigation and then actually got herself 'unofficially Attached' to Melanie Kelman's team and their investigation. If she rather than Gibbs had made the decision, Shepherd might have had Wetzel banned from the building or confined to a Holding cell for the duration.

But the woman had served competently - for a neophyte - and she'd gone from coming in losing a father to leaving knowing her mother had contracted his death after becoming a stranger's murderer and had used her as a patsy in a conspiracy too warped for words.

It's because of her grades at FLETC, her competency working with experienced agents, the devastating shocks of her parents' fates and that legendary slap - oh, how she wishes she could've seen it other than on a Security replay - that the woman is before her now.

x

"I've evaluated the reports of the agents you interacted with. Your job performance was credible."

"Thank you, Director." She seems to take great satisfaction in what she evidently considers high praise. Her next word wipes the self-satisfaction from the girl's face.

"However, dissatisfaction runs even deeper." Yes, the smile is gone. She intends to make sure it doesn't come back. "From Day One you were told you could not work this case and I would have expected even an Agent-Trainee to understand why. Not only were you emotionally tied to this case, a situation that can too often potentially distort the kind of dispassionate judgment we need to pursue investigations to a successful lawful conclusion, but anything you found could have been compromised or be successfully challenged and thrown out of court simply because you were personally involved."

"But ma'am, I worked the Hudson and Previt cases."

"Which were ultimately linked to that of your late father." Shepherd gives quite enough edge to her tone to convey to Wetzel just how little she appreciates being interrupted.

"Yes, Director." She's evidently properly contrite but, Shepherd senses, not cowed. She's pleased but won't show it. The woman is taking some hard knocks and bouncing back.

Let's see if she can rally from harder ones.

"In particular, I note that you repeatedly inserted yourself into these cases when you were directed not to. I distinctly remember you realized your duty was to leave Headquarters the other morning and you did not do so."

"Ma'am, I couldn't."

"Believe it or not, I do understand it though I do not condone it. Your behavior, your disobedience of Directives, would have gotten a full-fledged Agent Suspended Pending Review of her Status." She gives Wetzel a moment to appreciate that. "You interrupted an Interrogation." She imagines no one will ever do so on that scale again.

"That Bitch killed my father."

She won't debate the directness of the guilt. When Ruth Wetzel and the others laid their plan for murder, they became as guilty of the murders as a whole as well as of those they'd actually killed.

"I've read the evaluations from your Training Officers at FLETC. They generally show a woman with great potential–"

"Thank you, ma'am–"

"But I see someone who needs to find balance between enthusiasm and discretion, and most especially to develop self-control and discipline."

"Yes, ma'am."

"There is no place in NCIS or any other Federal Law Enforcement Agency for someone who disregards the Chain of Command or disobeys a direct order."

"But director, no one ordered me not to participate–"

"Did Special Agent DiNozzo lie when he reported that he told you you can't be involved?" She sees Wetzel realize she knows the situation in far more detail than she'd thought.

"No, ma'am. But though he did say I can't, he didn't order me not to."

x

Shepherd leans forward, hardens her expression and tone. "Do you often use semantic loopholes to get what you want?"

"No, ma'am," she answers sheepishly.

"What, then? Do you outrightly disregard inconvenient rules?"

"I... Permission to speak freely, Director?"

Very few people apply that military request to her, NCIS being an organization that created the concept of the informal, at least in communication. Free speech is the norm, always valued; nevertheless, she gives ten, fifteen, twenty seconds of hard-eyed silence before "Granted."

x

"Director, if you have the most recent report on me you know that the day my dad was murdered I also washed out of FLETC; that the only reason I'm going back to Georgia is to collect my things - which have probably already been boxed up. I had one opportunity - while still an Agent-Trainee, at least in your people's eyes - to use the resources of NCIS to catch my father's killer. It wasn't to get back in FLETC's good graces, to show them that I can be an Agent, that I do have potential even if I can't get back in; it was that I could solve my one-and-only case, that I haven't wasted my time or theirs, that I can be an Agent even if no one in the world believes that. That was my number two reason."

"And your number one?"

She leans forward, hands flat on the desk. "Since I'm now completely fired and fried, I'll tell you to your face that I was going to do everything in my power to get the bastard that murdered my daddy, and that while I'd've kept to the law there are some rules that had to be moved aside because nothing was going to stop me." She's running herself long, barely pausing for a breath. "I washed out of FLETC but before any of you found out about that I was going to get my dad's murderer, use every resource of NCIS within reach that I could beg, borrow or steal and I don't give a fuck what rule I had to shove aside because I was going to put that fucking bastard down."

x

"Are you done?"

"Yeah, I'm done." Half breathless, but she's done.

"Then get off my desk."

x

Wetzel straightens and Shepherd wonders if this is what she looks like when she thinks of her endless quest to take out 'La Grenouille'. "What happened that you washed out of FLETC?" From what she'd read in the young woman's records, that doesn't seem likely.

Karen's evidently galled by the humiliating memory but she tells the story about the early morning Training Exercise, the infiltration of the faux North Korean Embassy, her supposed success which crashed to utter ruin when her partner murdered her and how she'd then spent nearly two hours being ripped a new one by the Review Board, all topped off with the news her father had been murdered.

x

Shepherd watches Wetzel almost rupture blood vessels when she smiles up at her.

"Only two hours? They must not have found much to criticize." Karen's rage clawing at her mind is so easy to see, and Shepherd watches it rear back. "I took six rubber bullets that hurt like hell when I failed and then they 'ripped me a new one', as you put it, for over three hours, reduced me to tears before they were done and sent me to my room."

Karen gapes down at her and Shepherd grins. "Hardly one in twenty survive their test and no one makes it past the Board without bloodshed, because that's part two." She leans slightly forward. "Haven't you ever heard of the Kobayashi Maru?"

"Well sure, I–"

x

It's interesting to see the light come on in the young woman's eyes. Even with a strong tendency, noted in her FLETC psych files, to equate life experiences to movie and television events to a degree that almost rivals Agent DiNozzo's flair for movies, she probably never imagined she'd encounter a mythical Star Trek technique in real life.

Shepherd expects that the young woman had been called up to Washington before anyone could enlighten her and convey the real score of the two-pronged test. It's just as well, for she'll probably realize some day that this conversation makes it not a pitchfork but a trident.

"Shit," Karen exclaims and Shepherd knows she's probably remembering quite a bit of how she'd expressed her outrage. Junior non-agents do not speak to their Director as she had. "I've just talked myself out of the job, haven't I?"

"Very likely." She isn't above giving a few extra jabs with said trident.

"Director - ma'am, I'm sorry. What I meant so say was–"

"I'll be communicating my own evaluation of your performance to FLETC. Dismissed."

x

It looks like to move would shatter the young woman but she does manage to stone her face, turn – to execute an About Face actually - and walk to the door. She doesn't, however, make it further than her hand on the lever when she looks back. "One last thing?"

"There's always going to be 'one last thing' with you, isn't there, Wetzel?" She wonders if the young woman perceives the tense of her words.

"Am I going back to Georgia to pack?"

Evidently she hasn't; but it's equally certain to Shepherd that she will. She knows she can ease a lot of the trainee's anxieties with the reassuring truth but "Dismissed."

Wetzel's expression would be fitting for Mount Rushmore, but she leaves.

x

Shepherd has decided uncertainty will do the young woman better good than assurance will, as the student still has much to learn and lessons never end. She never wants to run an NCIS where progress hinges on blind obedience to orders, yet rules exist for valid reasons. Initiative in an agent is commendable but it must be balanced with discretion else a bullet can end a career, particularly one just beginning.

She turns to her computer. She will send a report on the girl's – young woman's; the trainees seem to get younger every year – handling of this case and herself, but her evaluation of the still potential agent will not go only to FLETC Administrator Mark Zito, it'll also go out west, to someone who can instruct an agent even better than FLETC might.

Eventually an application will cross the California Operation Manager's desk, and if anyone can cut the rough stone and polish the gem that remains, it's Henrietta Lange.

.

Next Episode: Supervillain Affair.

It's been a year since the Memorial Day Weekend 'Greater East Coast Comic Art Convention' that changed so much of Tim McGee's life. He's looking forward to a weekend away from NCIS to make up for last year's Convention's madness, but he's never imagined this.